For you dull Red-Staters and family-oriented suburban drudges not hip to what's au courant, New York Times critic Roberta Smith is here with the 911 on performance art.

Performance art may be getting its unruly, influential, shamanistic act together. At the moment, it seems to be the art world's medium of choice. Admired for its purity and subversive spirit, it is ubiquitous in gallery and museum exhibitions, whether on its own or as an active ingredient in video, installation art, sound art and photography.

...As of last night, performance art also has a New York biennial to call its own: Performa 05....The phenomenon of performance art dates back at least to World War I and the days of Dada and the Cafe Voltaire in Zurich. Since then, artists have regularly used it to torpedo the status, definition and market value of art....

The wobbly but vibrant inaugural version (of Performa 05) will unfold primarily in commercial art galleries and alternative spaces, through Nov. 21...The most prominent dot...(in the)...Performa 05 diagram is "Seven Easy Pieces," a series of performances by the Yugoslav performance innovator Marina Abramovic...(who)...will re-enact some of performance art's earliest, most sensational classics...The cavalcade of history will involve a dead hare, masturbation, crotchless pants and the use of razor blades, and promises a wild ride.

Ah, good old reliable transgression. About as wild a ride as the AMC Pacer. Smith trips on her own elitist deconstructionism: "performance art" does not, as she asserts, torpoedo the market value of art. Rather, it helps to put works of substance and effete dreck in sharper contrast.

You can buy a nice reproduction of a work by Caravaggio or Klee; a painting, lithograph or sculpture of actual refinement and quality by a lesser-known artist; Native American or folk art of enduring quality.

Alternatively, as Smith suggests, you can witness "a cavalcade of history" involving "a dead hare, masturbation, crotchless pants and the use of razor blades."

Or other so-called performance artists. Such as a fellow burying himself in sand to protest a war. Or some chaps serving human blood sausage in an Edinburgh art gallery. Or a government-funded artist downing lots of beers and trying out a balance beam in Cardiff. Or even an "anti-social" on display in a hot plastic box at a stoner-fest in the Nevada desert.

The value proposition has never been clearer.

TECHNORATI TAGS: PERFORMANCE ART, PERFORMA 05, NEW YORK, NEW YORK TIMES, ROBERTA SMITH, MARINA ABRAMOVIC, AMC PACER

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Posted by Matt Rosenberg at November 17, 2005 11:58 PM